Do you tell a secret or rock a megaphone? Twitter is an interesting social media channel for businesses. Currently, there are two very popular uses for Twitter in business marketplace - usually Twitter is used for customer service and often people set up automated search to respond to someone looking for or complaining about something.
In both of those instances it is an intimate conversation - usually the people engaging are specifically responding to an @ Someone. They are whisperers. Whisperers want to pull someone aside in a crowded bar and look in their eye and ask them what they need. It's as intimate an engagement as 140 characters allow - and as you might expect they have a lot less followers.
The next type of person is the bullhorn. This is the guy at the starting line of your local 10K race who is yelling about where the water stations are, what to do when you finish and how long to the start. He is using Twitter as in the old form of advertising and that is broadcasting one to many. Not a lot of interaction
The bullhorn is characterized by one specific characteristic - they retweet a lot of links. Nearly 300 times more than a typical Whisperer. So if you want more followers - get a megaphone and start finding interesting content. You can't tweet too much either. On average the most followed brands tweet twice an hour during the work day.
Big Tip: The final big tip of the blog comes from Dan Zarrella who has a new book out called the Science of Marketing. He looked at millions of tweets and sorted them by number of times the Tweeter self-referenced (used "I, me, mine, etc" ) and found, not surprisingly, the more someone talks about themselves the les followers they have. Dale Carnegie said years ago - be like a puppy always happy to see someone else and really concerned about having fun with them! Always remember: The key to social media marketing is user generated content. Here's the graph: